“GET Smart” Event Registration Software

“MICE” stands for Meetings, incentives, conferencing, exhibitions

An abbreviation that has not been used that often but always been present in the background of events. Most of us have been related to it in some way – we all have attended some exhibition or meeting at least once.

Companies (let’s call them Event Managers) expertise of which is management of MICE events come across quite serious challenges on their daily work.

The challenges of the industry

Let’s imagine an agriculture exhibition taking place in Germany. The Organizer of the exhibition asks Event Manager to help with the organization. What it means for the Event Managers:

The company organizing the exhibition needs to be able to invite Exhibitors and know which ones are going to participate;
Each Exhibitor needs to be able to invite and assign its employees for the “booth duty”;
Each Exhibitor needs to be able to invite guests (like representatives of the existing and potential partners);
Each Visitor and employee of the exhibition needs to approve participation and perform the registration process;
Each Exhibitor might want to offer a different set of services to its guests, employees and each registrant should point out which of those services are relevant;
Accommodation also should be taken care of for the employees and guests willing to stay for more than one day. Overbooking of the hotel rooms has to be prevented, too of course;
Each exhibition hall might have conference rooms where representatives can have meetings, therefore there should be an easy way for the participants to book the meeting rooms, each of which may have a different set-up, equipment and available services;
People travelling from other countries might be in need for Visa invitation letter in order to be able to cross the border and attend;

These are just some of the high level features many events imply and the configuration varies from event to event, from exhibitor to exhibitor.

The Event manager we built this software for started solving this problem a long time ago by developing software solutions tailored for each customer individually. With the time being, it became clear that a unified platform would be the long-term goal to achieve so that the setup and customization time can be reduced and only one software platform needs to be maintained.

The Event Manager came up with an idea to build a new platform called “GET Smart”, which would implement the mainstream workflows for all involved parties with a decent level of customization in place.

The development

We started our collaboration process with the Event Manager by discussing the business processes, involved parties, their tasks and challenges;
We drew wire-frames and mock-ups;
Then, we moved on by understanding the possible load that the system will have to handle and the agile development process spun up;
When the concept was established, the system architecture planning took place, while our designer worked on delivering nice UI and UX;
The development process started by implementing the software application from the bottom to the top and continuously reviewing all layers, making the necessary adjustments and implementing extra features on the top of the base functionality;
Functional and stress testing took place throughout the development process and was intensified when the solution was set up and running on a Kubernetes cluster in its native environment where it was going to “live”.

The results

The new “GET Smart” platform for MICE industry had acquired its shape and now features the following:

The Event Manager now can:
- Register their customers (Companies) in the system and give them dedicated company management rights;
- Manage the default contents for the application and emails;
- Manage the defaults for Company, Event, Exhibitor, Reservation, Invitation, and Hotel settings;
- Manage the default Queries (questionnaires);
- Manage the translations;
- Manage the settings on all lower levels (Company, Event, Exhibitor), if required;
Companies, on the other hand, can:
- Create Events on their own and customize their settings;
- Invite other companies (Exhibitors) on their own and assign default Supervisors to them;
- Customize the look of the tool for their instance, accessible by the Exhibitors;
The Exhibitors can:
- Customize the look of their instance, visible to the Registrants;
- Manage their supervisors;
- Mass-invite people to participate at the Event or invite them one by one;
- Manage the invitations (reminding, cancelling, etc.);
- Pull attendee, booth duty, hotel allotment, catering and other reports;
- Pull prepared Visa Invitation Letters for printing for those who have required them;
- Manage the booked hotel availability;
- Manage the conference room bookings;
The Registrants can:
- Easily register for the Event;
- Answer the defined questionnaires;
- Require a Visa Invitation Letter;
- Choose the hotel, room type and book it;
- Update their registration or cancel it;

In general, the platform features:

Limit tracking (so that no more entities register than it is allowed, eg., max. number of Exhibitors, max. Amount of Registrants, max. number of hotel rooms available, etc.)
Multiple languages;
Revision log (who and when did what);
Responsive, light-weight user interface;
Simple and intuitive user experience;
Scalability, thanks to the decentralized overall system architecture and containerization layer, powered by Docker and Kubernetes;